It’s impossible to participate in the local community without Indy Week. I moved here seven years ago, and the Indy has remained constant. They’ve informed me on the latest goings-on across the Triangle (and state) and boosted some of our many talented local artists.
As Arts & Culture Editor, Sarah Edwards has done a tremendous job covering news from around Durham, the Triangle, and North Carolina. It takes an organized editor to work with limited resources to manage the quality coverage she does. She’s also produced some essential local journalism in her own right; coverage for the Pioneers Church debacle or the re-opening of the Stanford L. Warren Library immediately comes to mind.
I was excited to meet Sarah in downtown Durham, near the Indy Week office. Her crucial perspective on local journalism ensured our conversation was as enlightening as I hoped it would be.
If you like Indy Week’s standard for local journalism, consider becoming a Press Club member to help Sarah and the whole team keep producing great stories.
What have you been listening to lately?
Sarah: The new Justin Robinson/Rhiannon Giddens album [What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow]. The new Bon Iver album [Sable, Fable] has some NC folks on it.
I have also been listening to Phil Cook‘s new instrumental album [Appalachia Borealis], which is gorgeous. He’s a really smart musician. It’s good working and walking music. Phil works with a lot of local musicians and has done a couple of piano albums. This is my favorite of his by far. It’s meditative, and it makes me feel very present.
It’s good to keep the pitch simple. Keep that up front for people who don’t read the whole article.
I wish we could’ve done a piece on it, but it just didn’t work out that way. We have a pretty small budget every month, much smaller than I think people realize.
We’re at a very interesting moment in music journalism and culture coverage where people need to be vocal and engage more, or it will disappear. Pitchfork, for example, has had ebbs and flows, and many other publications have gone underwater. I’ve been at the Indy for six years, and even then, I feel like people engage in very different ways with music coverage. They’re a little less nerdy about it.
I think that’s a product of the attention economy. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to learn about a musician, you read up on them. Now, you can just go directly to their Instagram page or whatever. So, the exploratory aspect of music has changed, and people are less invested in niche music communities.
What does that shift in reader engagement with music coverage look like from your perspective?
I don’t hear much from anybody about the music section. That makes it hard for me to advocate to my bosses that this coverage is worth doing in a sustained, continued way.
People talk in an abstract way about how the Indy was known for its music coverage back in the heyday, but we still do a lot of music coverage. We have excellent writers who are wonderful and knowledgeable. But I worry because I don’t get much feedback or see the level of engagement with pieces that I used to.
All forms of journalism and coverage evolve as music evolves. I’m sure that there are ways that I need to adapt, and our writers need to adapt to creatively keep up with the way that people are exploring and finding entry points to local music. So part of that is our responsibility. But if people want to keep reading local music coverage, they need to let us know.
How does that differ from the average artist or label’s engagement?
We get plenty of press releases and engagement from publicists on the front end. There’s a statistic that the ratio of publicists to journalists is six to one. And who knows how many journalists are doing any culture coverage.
There has been a drop in how that coverage has been shared and engaged with. We live in an era with so much emphasis on branding that I don’t know how interested artists are in coverage that doesn’t entirely align with their own perception of their brand. If you want engagement and to be considered in that thoughtful way, you have to be open to people saying things that aren’t exactly in alignment with your own idea of your music or of your personal brand. I really respect when an artist is like, “Not everything this writer wrote about me resonates, but I appreciated their reflections on my work!”
And that’s happening in conjunction with bands like Slow Teeth, saying the community feels more active and connected than before COVID. It feels like there’s an engagement void as social media networks get even more fragmented.
Ryan Cocca wrote a piece last year that spoke to this in a really interesting way. He talked about how playlists have replaced music criticism as the currency that artists really care about and advocate to be on. Rather than wanting to have someone write about you in a way that digs deep into your music, publicists and artists just want to get playlists.
I don’t blame them. People have these five-second attention spans, and a playlist listing will catch their eye and ears more than a 4,000-word piece on someone’s music history.
I was talking to a musician recently about the trickle-down effect of fans who will spend $800 on a Taylor Swift ticket, which is their yearly concert budget. Because of that, people pour more energy and attention into these fanatical fandoms, which takes away from a more general interest. If you’re going to one concert a year, you’ll miss the local shows.
There’s much to be said about using your live music budget on cheap local shows.
I may be speaking out of my ass here, but I feel like for younger generations, sometimes being a Chappell Roan fan or Taylor Swift fan is an identity thing. It’s an affirmation of who you are to go to these shows and to buy in. I don’t have anything against that, but that does detract from potential investment in these smaller shows. We’ve gotten out of that habit.
I interviewed Chatham Rabbits, and Sarah [McCombie, singer/banjoist/band manager] talked about going out to shows like exercising. It’s something that, until you do it repeatedly, you forget that it feels good and is a way of appreciating music. We forget that it’s participatory, not just background noise. Going to a show requires more of a person.
Let’s take a step back in your career. How did you get your start in journalism?
In a very roundabout way, I didn’t study journalism. After college, I moved to New York to pursue writing in the broadest, most naive way possible. That meant that I worked in a coffee shop for a few years. Eventually, I started freelancing more; I fact-checked at the Village Voice and worked in an event role for a magazine, which helped me get exposure to the writing world. And I couldn’t tell you how many places I pitched.
Eventually, I started a grad program for creative writing that I dropped out of. When I dropped out, that brought me back to Durham. By then, I had enough clips and experience to start writing for the Indy and then get hired. But it was a very winding path.
What drew you to covering arts and culture?
It wasn’t intentional. Because I freelanced, I wrote about what I liked. I’m interested in books and photography. I don’t have niche experience in any of those things, but I’m curious about them. There are a lot of really talented and interesting people, and I want to know more about what they do and how they do it.
Curiosity is such an underrated skill. It really separates those who want to do something from those who will do it no matter what.
That’s absolutely true. No one should feel intimidated or like they need to have a background in something. As a journalist, your job is to do your research and come prepared. Beyond that, you don’t have to impress someone with how much you know about what they’re doing. It’s to ask questions.
I’ve heard from folks asking how I interview musicians because they want to do it. I want to shake them and say, “Who’s stopping you? The world’s on fire, and Katy Perry went to space. If not now, when?”
That’s the phrase of the summer: “YOLO, Katy Perry went to space.”
What does your average day-to-day look like at the Indy?
The breakdown would probably be like 20% meetings, 30% emailing, 25% writing, and 25% editing. If anyone cares. [laughs]
There’s got to be at least one person who’s like, “I can do that, let me go down that path!”
I am lucky to have a job that is dynamic, where I get to be curious and pay attention to things. The fun thing about writing is that you get to be in someone else’s brain, which sometimes I like and sometimes I don’t. There are not many writing jobs out there, so I feel fortunate in that sense.
I also fucking love Durham. I love the Triangle, I love North Carolina, and I feel very privileged to be able to pay attention to it and write about it when I get to.
How do you approach covering art or music outside your personal expertise or taste?
It’s not that different from engaging with art that I like. Anyone who writes about stuff outside their immediate interests has to make a concerted effort to approach it with an open mind. That sounds basic, but it’s a good habit to learn first and then write it as a story without your ego.
A book review would be different because I’m not putting my opinions to the side. But if I’m writing about someone whose work isn’t my cup of tea, but what they’re doing is good and important, then it doesn’t matter what my personal tastes are. That’s not definitive.
The Triangle is so broad. There’s a fantastic breadth of art and music: jazz, electropop, folk — not to mention the breadth of writing, scholarship, and everything else. My job is not to approach things with my personal taste. It’s to figure out what people want to know more about, what needs to be represented, and balance what’s overrepresented with what’s underrepresented. I don’t do a perfect job of that, but that’s definitely the goal.
You’re doing your best with your budget, time, and capacity.
I wish people had more good faith and generosity about that because there’s much to cover. We have great freelancers willing to write for what we pay; that’s what we’re working with. The Indy used to have a music-specific editor rather than just a culture editor of everything. We’ve had several editors who could speak to the technical side because they often were musicians [or artists] and embedded in the music community. I have more of a bird’s eye view because I edit a bigger section.
What local music stories are you most proud of championing?
Today, I put out a story I’m really proud of on Rhiannon Giddens. It’s an interview, not a feature, but she’s brilliant and insanely eloquent that an interview may be the best format. I’m proud of that because she is presenting Biscuits & Banjos in a couple of weeks. There are all these amazing callbacks to 2005 when the Carolina Chocolate Drops formed and Black Banjo Then and Now, which was an old-time gathering, happened in Boone at App State. She’s doing this festival 20 years after the fact, which is amazing.
We had a cover story in 2005 that had her bandmate Dom Flemons on the cover. As she says in the interview, that was a big moment for them because they were a pretty young band. Sometimes, you have people on the cover where it’s no big deal for them. They’re a regular, they’ve been on the cover several times, or they’re famous and it’s not a big deal. But in this one instance, it did elevate their profile.
So we have her on the cover 20 years later, and by now, she’s on every cover. She’s absolutely brilliant and has gotten a lot of acclaim that’s well-deserved because her scholarship is incredible.
That’s really satisfying for me because it tells a story that goes back 20 years. We’re fortunate to have a festival that honors the roots of Black music and foodways — when that history is being very blatantly and violently suppressed — front and center in our city. It’s important to make sure that it’s on the cover and is something that we’re really celebrating and prioritizing as a city. That’s a piece where I’m like, “Okay, we did it this week!”
Who are some of your favorite local/North Carolina artists?
My coworker messaged me today to ask about doing a piece on the MJ Lenderman “Wristwatch” music video. And he messaged me as I was listening to “Wristwatch”. I felt like so much of a cliche.
I really love Indigo De Souza. I don’t know if you saw her opening for the Bernie Sanders rally in Los Angeles. It was a crazy lineup of musicians; I’m proud she did that.
Locally, I like Chatham Rabbits and Viv & Riley. I’ve mentioned Phil Cook, but I would also add Alli Blois and Jake Xerxes Fussell. Yasmin Williams is based in Virginia but is coming to Biscuits & Banjos; I really enjoy her instrumental stuff. And I’m obsessed with the Sylvan Esso/Reyna Tropical song “Cartegna”. It’s a real bop.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Leave a Reply